With acknowledgments—to Simone Weil, Claude Monet, Marc Chagall, Ana Mendieta, and the myriad anonymous artists, architects, gardeners, pigment collectors, inkmakers, bookbinders, printers, stonecutters, masons, cement setters, glaziers, surveyors, engineers and so many others, who left to the future an emptiness greater than whatever fullness of purpose they understood—namely a newness of world to meet death, and a welcoming hand to the slow grief that sudden grief becomes, and eventually a way to smile at sorrow's most insistent question: what to do with love now that the once-direct ways of loving are gone—?
Paris, 2025